#Autosprawl has been subsidized by deferring maintenance

Resource Insights: "The trouble with infrastructure is that it breaks down and needs to be repaired, it wears out and needs to be replaced, and it gets destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. All that requires energy, resources, labor and money."

The US has extensive infrastructure supporting autos and sprawl. Farmland has been turned into suburbs. This spreading requires a lot of expensive pipelines, bridges, and roads. The repairs of such things have been deferred, while home builders and oil companies took profit. Now, the bill is due and there is no cheap oil to borrow against.

Unsafe pipelines, another externalized cost of sprawl

Boulder Weekly: " There are — according to data miner and anti-fracking activist Shane Davis — 60,000 miles worth of potentially explosive flowlines in Colorado, including many miles running under neighborhoods just like Firestone. That’s enough pipelines full of explosive materials to circle the Earth nearly 2.5 times. And that’s just the flowlines in Colorado that the COGCC is sort of in charge of regulating. (I’ll explain that comment shortly.)"

Texas oil booms characterized by pollution and waste

processhistory : "Mirroring the industry’s lawless oil towns, for much of the twentieth century, Texas’ oil industry regulation was minimal. In the 1920s and 1930s, gushers spewed oil across the desert. In West Texas, most oil was located on top of subsurface salt domes, which once tapped, spewed salt brine water across the desert. Oil storage tanks and drilling slush pits—used to collect chemicals, mud, and other debris produced during drilling—were unlined, often leaking into surrounding ranchland. Legislators critiqued such practices as gratuitous waste of a precious resource."

Economic calculation of EROEI. Are you including health costs and cleanup? What abut permanent damage to ecology? These are the uncounted costs of autosprawl, while profits is extracted from the oil well to the cul-de-sac.